North American airports are employing new methods for baggage check-in and shipping. A passenger is typically able to buy the ticket and check in online. With the boarding pass in hand, the only remaining step is to handle the passenger baggage. In the airports attempts to reduce queues and automate the whole process of passenger check-in, passengers are now responsible for taking the baggage to a conveyor belt. The consequence of this is that a part of the conveyor belt is accessible to the public which cases many issues including safety and security issues.
It would seem logical for each Airline to supervise this process directly because the luggage belt poses a safety risk for the passengers. In practice, however, Airline staff may be engaged in other tasks and do not directly monitor the luggage loading processes.
These public and unobserved luggage belt areas have introduced several safety and security concerns.
Safety:
There are three main kinds of accidents that could lead to harm: injuries caused by the conveyor belt itself, caused by the conveyor belts steep decline behind the public area and health risks caused by the industrial X-ray scanner.
There are two main reasons why people get onto the conveyor belt. Firstly passengers are requested to lift and load items that may weigh 20 kg or more onto various configurations of moving luggage belts. Some people become unbalanced and fall on the belt. For example, an elderly person tripped onto the belt while attempting to put the baggage on the belt. Secondly there have been cases of passengers deliberately climbing onto the luggage belt. For example, there have been incidents where children took joyrides on the luggage belt.
Security:
It has to be guaranteed that no unauthorized person can enter the security sterile baggage handling area with the conveyor belt. This could interrupt and delay the baggage loading process at the airport. There are several other security ramifications arising like theft, vandalism and terrorism.
Main challenges and problem cases:                The algorithm has to have a very low false positive rate. One to two bags of the 600000 bags transported daily are allowed to be registered as false alarms.        Crouched humans sitting still on the conveyor belt and thus expressing no motion.        Occlusion of body parts.        Variety of expected postures due to the camera position: standing people, people laying on the conveyor belt in different orientations, crouched humans.        “Hot bags” emitting heat similar to humans.        Unusual movement like falling, still (but moving with the conveyor belt), running, walking.        Visual noise: moving shadows, light reflections, arms adjusting the baggage which should not trigger the alarm.        Variety of different movement speed: running in the same direction as the conveyor belt produces very fast motion and walking in the opposite direction produces a very slow motion.        
Authors who have worked on the problem of detecting humans in video, include: Thome N., Ambellouis S., Bodor R., Jackson B., Papanikolopoulos N., Bertozzi M., Broggi A., Fascioli A., Graf T., Meinecke M-M., Zhou J., Hoang J, Wren C R, Azarbayejani A, Darrell T, Pentland A P, Gutta S., Brodsky T., Steffens J B, Elagin E V, Nocera L P A, Maurer T, Neven H, Chen H-P, Ozturk O, Yamasaki T, Aizawa K, Zin T T, Takahashi H, Hama H, Gilmore III E T, Frazier P D, Chouikha M F, Dalal N, Triggs B, Schmid C, Viola P, Jones M, Miezianko R, Pokrajac D, Grisleri P, Cutler R, Davis L S, Sidenbladh H, Toth D, Aach T, Lee D-Jye, Zhan P, Thomas A, Schoenberger R, Snow D, Zhu Q, Yeh M-C, Cheng K-T, Avidan S, Suard F, Rakotomamonjy A, Bensrhair A, Del Rose M, Felisa M, Yao J, Odobez J M, Tuzel O, Porikli F, Meer P, Fujimura K, Xu F, Kim H G, Ahn S C, Kim N H, Echigo T, Maeda J, Nakano H, Schwartz W R, Kembhavi A, Harwood D, Fang Y, Yamada K, Ninomiya Y, Horn BKP, Masaki I, Yun T-J, Guo Y-C, Chao G.
However there remains a need for a system capable of distinguishing humans from other blobs in a video.